Managing the new technology

Abstract

The vexed question of the relationship between sociological and other accounts of social behaviour is also raised by the last of the three most obviously policy-relevant studies which I have included among my selected texts. George Brown and Tirril Harris’s Social Origins of Depression summarizes the results of a lengthy sociological study of psychiatric disorder in women. The authors attempt to identify stressful life-events (such as separation from one’s spouse, a change of residence, or even witnessing a serious accident) which are causally linked to mental disorder. However, from their earlier work on schizophrenia, they are aware of the possible contamination of causal analyses that can arise from the tendency among patients to search retrospectively for potential provoking agents which might help explain their psychiatric disorders. In other words, some respondents make an ex post facto ‘effort after meaning’ which might lead them to reinterpret their biography, perhaps even as a result of unintended prompting during the course of the sociological interview itself. They assign a meaning after the onset of depression to an event that happened beforehand which they would not necessarily have considered noteworthy prior to the illness. Such reworking of the past can seriously compromise any causal analysis. An observed association between mental disorder and severe life-events might, at least in some part, be simply an artefact of the research design. The unit of study (stressful life-event) and its putative consequences (clinical depression) appear to be causally related precisely because they have been confounded during the process of measurement.

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